Mary, Did You Know?: Song Analysis

During Oakdale High Schools winter concert I performed the song “Mary, Did You Know?” in a small ensemble with Patrick McFarland on trumpet, Zach Kemp on mellophone, and Bryce Krasauskis on trombone. The arrangment we did was Pentatonix’s version of the song.
“Mary, Did You Know?” was originally written by Mark Lowery and the music composed by Buddy Green in 1991. The song was then released, sung by Micheal English, on the album Micheal English. The song depicts all the future accomplishments and miracles that Jesus hypothetically would accomplish in his lifetime.
The version of the song we did was by Penatonix. Penatonix is an acapella group consisting of five members originally from Arlington, Texas. They started their group in 2011 and have released four albums so far, two of which were Christmas albums. That’s Christmas to Me was their third album and contained their version of “Mary, Did You Know?”. This version rose to popularity in 2014 and reached the 26th spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
We decided to prepare the piece separately unitl the week before the concert. The decision to not actually put all of our parts together until then was our main obstacle and ultimately caused the downfall of our performance. This lack of coordination and planning caused us to not be able to cohesivley play the song together. Due to waiting until the last week to fit our parts together the experience of the week before the concert can be best described as trying to frantically fit a square peg into a round hole while on a time